The latest brainchild of John Cook is the free online edX course Denial 101x. This course, tackling basic climate science as well as the science of climate change denial, had amassed 15,000 students as of May 12.

You can access the video lectures and interviews on their YouTube channel without even signing up for the course. The best video content, in my opinion, is the full interviews with scientists. They are such interesting people with so many stories to tell, and the conversational style of the interviews makes the quality of communication absolutely top-notch. I like to listen to these interviews while I wash the dishes (our apartment has been extra clean recently thanks to John Cook).

Here are my favourites from Week 1 alone (there are multiple hours of interviews released each week, it’s kind of overwhelming):

Naomi Oreskes, who is such a strong and smart and feisty person – I want to be just like her. “My husband always says that when [climate change deniers] started attacking me, they really didn’t know what they were up against.”

Katharine Hayhoe, who brings a new perspective I haven’t really thought about much: how to reach people of faith. “I received so much support from colleagues who say, ‘I do not share your faith or don’t even understand your faith, but I support what you’re doing.'”

Michael Mann, who has probably been through more than anyone else in this community, but has nonetheless kept an incredibly positive attitude. “What I’m concerned about, more concerned about, is the fact that there are now many younger scientists out there who are doing research on climate change, and when they publish a paper that gets a lot of attention, they are finding themselves subject to these orchestrated attacks. In many cases, they’re just graduate students. They have absolutely no experience in dealing with this sort of issue.”

About

Kaitlin Naughten is a PhD student in climate science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She became interested in climate science as a teenager on the Canadian Prairies, and increasingly began to notice the discrepancies between scientific and public knowledge on climate change. She started writing this blog at age sixteen to help address this gap in public understanding, and it slowly evolved into a record of her research as a young climate scientist. Read more

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